The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

‘In the end life is reduced to a heap of random, unconnected details. It could have been like this or like that, it's absolutely immaterial.’

A pink cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener: these are some of the contents of Roland the Walrus’s stomach, displayed by his pool in Berlin Zoo. These objects, like the reflections, dreams and diary entries that make up this novel, at first appear to be unconnected. But, underpinned by both quiet tragedy and humour, the fragments soon coalesce to reveal the shattered world of a life in exile.

Here Dubravka Ugrešic wades through the wreckage of war as the everyday objects in her metaphorical museum take on new meaning to make sense of displacement, aging and loss. Written in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a haunting meditation on the weight of the past and the fractured collections of memories that define us all.

Translated from Serbo-Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth